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EFF is leaving X

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951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: EFF is leaving X

#951
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization. I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the i…

I mentioned that interpretation very briefly in my post. If EFF had continued to be better at political neutrality, I'm sure many observers would have been surprised at times that it declined to take positions on some of the hot issues of the day. That hypothetical reticence could have been interpreted as cowardice or irrelevance, or as saving up political capital to really focus on a smaller number of more fundament…

>if the organization were seen as less leftist

I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?

When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.

Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.

Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!

No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

Re: EFF is leaving X

#952

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Twitter in 2026 is a political statement. I don't consume it, but using Twitter would be supporting right wing extremism (or whatever you classify Musk as).

Maybe, but this is not what they claim in their post. Their official reason is that the numbers are not working out. And even if that was the reason, that doesn't make sense. They're an activist organisation, their goal is to promote their ideas to people that need to hear them, and twitter users need that more than bluesky users. Btw. I login to twitter once every few months to share my blog post or report. That's n…

I replied to a comment, not EFF. EFF is doing the correct thing, but very late. I'm not advocating for one platform over another.

It is indirectly a political statement to use Twitter. You are supporting Elon Musk who has made himself a central figure in extreme right wing political views.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#953

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this related to the article? It feels like you went way off-topic with a person pet peeve.

It's related, because over 1000 comments here are discussing why they are making such a political move (cloaking it as an audience "reach" issue). You may want to skim the rest of the comments to understand the issue. The X platform is where many conservatives and centrists reside. I don't have an issue with EFF wanting to no longer align itself with anyone who is not on the Left, but I prefer they just state that in…

I dunno man, its seems like you were the one that brought up the political slant. I didn't see politics in that article.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#954
post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media. This is not true at all, and it's a silly statement. X isn't mainstream anymore, and the people who think it is are simply stuck in a bubble. I suspect you might be one of the "terminally online people" you're denigrating as not "regular people". X's MAU is in the ballpark as Quora or Pinterest. "Pinterest gets you more eyes tha…

>This is not true at all, and it's a silly statement. X isn't mainstream anymore, and the people who think it is are simply stuck in a bubble Used by 20% of adults, of course it's mainstream, everyone knows what it is, it regularly gets quoted on TV, you are looking outside from the bubble, not at the bubble

Can you link a source to that 20% of adults figure? I cannot believe 1 billion people use Twitter

Re: EFF is leaving X

#955
post #340

I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019. When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-w…

A lot of what happened politically in the late 2010s and hit its peak during COVID was that this meme grew that people were thinking and saying things so offensive, we had to make sure they didn’t have a voice on any viable platform.

Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.

There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:

• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.

• Respond to the speech with more speech.

Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.

It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.

So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.

It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.

The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.

The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.

What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.

Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.

[1] https://nuancepill.substack.com/ is spreading the good word.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#957

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BlueSky and Mastodon are much smaller than Twitter/X, and they're staying on the platforms, so this is a moot point.

BlueSky and Mastodon are both open platforms designed around the ideals of digital freedom and control of your own data and feed. It makes perfect sense for the EFF to remain on platforms which are aligned with their goals. This is like criticizing them for dropping Microsoft Word but still using Libre Office.

Sure, but Facebook and TikTok are not "open platforms designed around the ideals of digital freedom and control of your own data and feed."

This makes absolutely no sense because EFF is staying on those platforms, so this point is also moot.

It's almost like there's an ulterior motive at play...

Re: EFF is leaving X

#958
I have a different view: X has been a night and day improvement over the old Twitter.

Community Notes mean that if you see misleading information, it is accompanied by facts. It even uses notifications to show you corrections to something you saw previously.

Free speech is actually encouraged and is flourishing.

Grok is a world class AI tool.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#959

>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better. Does this not apply to X users?

I don't use Facebook, Instagram & Tiktok. But I do use X, since there the censoring is least on X amongst all those platforms.

Exactly! I love the freedom of speech, and Community Notes are the best possible way to deal with misinformation.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#960
post #340

I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019. When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-w…

A lot of what happened politically in the late 2010s and hit its peak during COVID was that this meme grew that people were thinking and saying things so offensive, we had to make sure they didn’t have a voice on any viable platform. Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off…

I also heard the slogan "the answer to bad speech is more speech" frequently inside EFF in the first half of my time working there and almost never in the second half.

It's actually a conceptually challenging question for me to try to account for why that changed. I would like to go off and ponder that a bit.

I should also emphasize that EFF has never advocated for narrowing what is protected speech under the first amendment. Even when people stopped habitually saying "the answer to bad speech is more speech", they didn't somehow start saying "the answer to bad speech is making it illegal".

I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation. I remember in college (1997) someone had a poster based on the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking" with the quote that they use from Stephen Hawking:

  It doesn't have to be like this
  All we need to do is make sure we keep talking
I can't really imagine a college student in 2026 having that poster (regardless of that student's political views).
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